According To Hoyt

This is a post about victimhood: admiring, sanctifying, exploiting, parading and – strangest of all – stealing victimhood.

Guys, seriously, if aliens dropped in from alpha centauri tomorrow they would think we are very odd creatures. What is it with the big fights over who the biggest victim is, shaming and trying to make people feel guilty because they aren’t victims, claiming victimhood on behalf of anyone else and, most important of all, endowing oneself with someone else’s victimhood by white-knighting for them?

To define things: a victim is someone to whom, through no fault of his or her own, unpleasant things happen. Worse, in today’s lexicon, to cultivate the victimhood, a victim must remain a victim and allow bad things to continue happening to him/her. The minute he stops being a victim he loses all victimhood points.

So… who would WANT to be a victim. Beats me. I’ve been one at times, through no fault of my own, and it was pretty unpleasant.

Part of this, I think, is a perversion of the desire to help others. For instance, in books, it is easiest to gain sympathy with a character if pretty unpleasant things have happened/continue to happen to them. Anyone who has read my books knows I’m not above using those.

Here’s the thing, though, in a book worth reading, the character doesn’t come in whining and sobbing, doesn’t drape himself all over you claiming victimhood and REMAIN A VICTIM for the rest of the story. Instead, the character shoulders his or her limitations, grows and becomes admirable not by feeling sorry for him/herself, but by doing something worthwhile. If he or she does remain a passive victim, for this reader at least, the book takes flying lessons.

Mind you, if your ambition is to be assigned to a school’s reading schedule, then that’s exactly what the book should be. I don’t know how many of the kids’ assigned books could be described as “Downtrodden minority has a shower of sh*t rained on his/her head every page of the book, till the end when he/she dies a horrible death or achieves revenge in some stupid way.” It’s the plot of all of them I skimmed.

Add to that the strange concoction of sixties/seventies ideas that no one is ever guilty of anything and that even the most heinous criminal was driven to it by society, and we have… a fine mess, where being a victim gives you license to do whatever you want, and be as nasty as you want to perceived “evildoers” while remaining “saintly” because you are a victim.

As a confession, when I was in 9^th grade, during the final exams (the ultimate accountability exam. It having come to someone’s attention that through the previous three years, the first years of the revolution, teaching had been spotty; days had been spent painting murals and having our “consciousness” raised and that some schools were never in fact assigned teachers, in 9^th grade they made us take a nationally scored exam – ours was the first and weirdest year, since we weren’t prepared for it, but since then it’s become a national thing. You had to pass the exam to continue or, in fact, to have any chance at college.) which were stressful-crazy, since most of the stuff on them we’d never been taught, and “I haven’t been taught this” was no reason for the question not to count, one of the boys in the all-boy school across from mine committed suicide.

In retrospect, he must have been mentally ill. What he left behind was the usual “manifesto” bumble broth of complaints about how we were treating the environment and men’s inhumanity to men.

His letter made the rounds of both schools and more than one of us posted it in some public space, because of course, he was a “victim of society” and we identified with him.

This was foolishness. First, I’m fairly sure he was mentally ill (though it might not have been permanent had he survived. In the boiling broth leading up to those exams, all of us could be fairly overheated) and second, it was his decision to kill himself, not anyone in society.

But as adolescents we were primed to view “he was driven to it” as a reason enough and to lionize him. It was the spirit of the times. Nothing better than being the ultimate victim: a dead one.

It wasn’t always this way. One of my favorite books is A Little Princess, which is admittedly my most girlish taste in reading. I read it round about twelve, and granted, the girl is a victim. But the thing is, she doesn’t stay a victim. Through imagination and compassion, she builds a universe for herself that can’t be destroyed, and is ultimately rewarded. (BTW the movie is not like the book, and the book is better.)

And there were times, further back, when being poor or a “victim” in any way was proof that you were somehow evil. A bit of this mentality is preserved in Islam’s belief that Christ could not have been crucified, because that would be proof he wasn’t a prophet.

Yes, if you look further back, there are some hints of this in the Judeo Christian tradition. All the prophets of Israel seemed to be cast out and wander the wilderness doing the Biblical equivalent of eating out of trashcans, which was a necessary passage to their destiny, and of course Christian martyrs went singing psalms to the lions’ bellies. (Believe it or not, they did. It was a great factor in early conversions. Though I suspect now and then, one of them, faith or not, indulged in a good cry or scream. Who knows?)

What one is apt to forget in our secular days is the difference between dying in the FIRM belief in a reward on the other side, or suffering ill on Earth in the certainty that Himself will life one up after. The amount of certainty in the afterlife even among people in my village dwarfed my most faith-filled moments. They spoke of it incidentally and casually, as one plans a holiday or a trip abroad. I think that most of those days from which the stories of true martyrs come to us were more like that, and in face of the great reward promised, a passage through brief victimhood was acceptable.

It was perhaps predictable the tradition would get perverted by the romantics.

But it in itself, it wouldn’t matter much, hadn’t Marx got his foot in the intellectual door of the West. (Like a bad salesman. A little bearded ink blot, selling hatred and divisiveness.)
It was Marx who allotted victimhood out by classes and classes in a later evolution of his theory came to be apportioned by such weird characteristics as sex, race or sexual attraction.

According to the neo-Marxists what you are determines your victimhood. You can neither escape nor change it.

Take me, for instance, as a Latina (and fairly dark if I spent any time in the sun, which I don’t), an immigrant, a woman, I am by definition downtrodden and a victim. My days are filled with endless struggle and humiliation. There is no way to change that… unless of course, I declare non-Marxist opinions when the other side will immediately define me as white and call me names. They have to define me as white before they call me names, otherwise they just would add to my victimhood points. (No, I don’t know what you get if you win. Perhaps a set of matched shot glasses.)

But don’t despair, if you’re born lilly white, and even – gasp – male, you can be a victim by proxy so long as your opinions are red. You become a champion of the downtrodden and from then on you can attribute everything that goes wrong in your life to political discrimination.

Sorry, I rolled my eyes so hard I dropped them. Will someone please retrieve them for me and dust off the cat hair. Right.

Do I need to tell you this is nonsense?

Yes, of course, some people are victims. In fact, I will pretty confidently state we’re all victims sometime. Sometimes it’s when we’re too young to know better. And sometimes it is because we love someone and allow him or her to take advantage of us. And sometimes it’s even because of our sex, color, or sexual orientation.

Most of the time, though we’re only victims for some time.

Even the people I know who grew up in the hardest circumstances imaginable, usually turned their lives around when they became adults/moved away.

In fact to remain a victim seems to take either mental illness or extraordinary effort not to improve one’s circumstances.

And no, of course, victimhood doesn’t always follow the lines that people tell you should be victims. Say you grew up in a middle class community as a black person, in America. You might think you’re a victim – only because the SJW’s tell you that night and day – but the truth is that you’re nowhere near victimhood. The poor black baby born to a crack addicted mother in Detroit is. As is a white baby in similar circumstances. Notwithstanding which, they might both turn out all right and have a good life.

Because here’s the thing: this is America. We don’t have a caste system. As study after study shows, people move all over the map, not just physically but economically.

America is a country where you can reinvent yourself. Unless, of course, you’re wedded to your victimhood and think it confers something special upon you.

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. If you’re a victim, it doesn’t make you special, or good or full of human kindness. It is in fact likely to make you the opposite – human nature being what it is. But mostly, you’ll be the same human you were before you were victimized. And being victimized doesn’t excuse your acting horribly. Self-defense is not the same as hurting those who never did any harm to you.

Your “class of victimhood” doesn’t count in anyone’s mind but Marxists, and come on, those people are crazy cultists. It doesn’t make you better or worse than anyone else.

And if you experienced a little pang at reading that, it’s time you came out of the dank darkness of Marxism and into the light.

You see, while being a certain color or orientation or sex might cause crazy people who follow a long-dead white-man (failed) prophet of doom to fawn upon you, refusing to be a victim, taking your lumps and learning from your experiences and battling on, makes you human, and an individual human at that.

And if you are an individual human, not trying to follow any script, the possibilities are limitless, and you decide where you go and – depending on how much effort you’re willing to put in – how far you go.

And that – that – is far more fun and more interesting than being a perpetual victim.

Stand tall. You’re a free man/woman. Despite what the Social Justice Warriors Whiners would have you believe, your future is not dictated by your skin color, sex, orientation, or even (within limits) your handicap.

Your future is yours, and only you can script it.

UPDATE: Today being Wednesday, I have a post up at Mad Genius Club.

For those of you living in a hole, who haven’t read about how Damien Walter, who for inexplicable reasons is taken seriously enough by The Grauniad to be given column space, has so far pursued his fascination with Larry Correia as to indulge himself with a fishing expedition on Twitter, trying to find “proof” of whatever crazy prejudices he attributes to Larry.

He also indulged himself – poor man – with yet another column Whining the Future, and explaining to the world how everyone who disagrees with him (the problem is it’s so hard to agree with someone who says crazy stuff like “the future is queer” – which leads one to add “and short”) is a dinosaur clinging to his guns and religion – oops, sorry, that was another person running his mouth about people who didn’t agree with him and whom he didn’t understand homophobic/racial/cultural/purple dinosaur privilege/prejudices, and how little Damien’s way is the way of the future. (No, I have no idea how large this man is, but reading him one can’t help imagining him about four feet tall and wearing short pants. For some reason, I also see him holding a lollipop, but that’s unlikely.)

I’ll leave the detailed fisking to the professionals: John C. Wright and Larry Correia. Really, when they were done there was nothing but a few scrapings of “progressivism” on the floor, and to attempt to revisit the column in detail would go way beyond beating a dead horse, to attempting to reconstitute the horse from a few strands of DNA. I’m not so ambitious, so I’ll merely note, as Larry did, that my experience too is that these loud-and-proud social workers who mistake themselves for authors are running people off reading in droves. They might be – some of them are, at least on paper – bestsellers, but this is a much diminished bestsellerdom compared to even the midlisters of the seventies.

And please spare me the excuses publishers made for years: it’s the movies, it’s tv, it’s the internet.

As someone who is hopelessly old-fashioned in her choice of entertainment, preferring reading over just about anything else, and who is friends with a great many similarly unnatural people, for years we’d gather together and lament the lack of anything to read, no matter how we looked. Also, as the mother of two young men of this our present time, who have had the net at their fingertips since the age of three, I can tell you that the internet never stopped them from reading. On the contrary, they’re likely to have one eye on youtube and one on a book – provided the book is interesting enough. And incidentally neither of them found it hard to get into Agatha Christie or Robert A. Heinlein or even C. S. Lewis, language conventions and a bygone mode of life notwithstanding.

Rather the problem has been that for the last fifty years or so, publishers and not a few writers have confused the production of stories for sale with a sacred calling of pushing “progressive” opinions, situations and narratives down people’s throats, whether the buying public wanted the narratives or not. Because they believed that this “future” is inevitable, and also just (in the sense it would destroy many people who are better off than these writers and a few who are worse off, but whom the writers imagine despise them, anyway) and therefore must be pushed.

The public responded well enough to an extent, while those narratives were somewhat understated, but the problem is that given the monopoly of the big publishers over the culture, and their ability to control the laydown on a book, they lost track of the fact that the progressive narrative was not … ah… universally acknowledged, and that the impression that it was was something they themselves fostered. And so they decided to push ever outward, and more bravely towards ever more “progressive” public re-education.

Which is why at this point reading some of the more “daring” fiction, you have to go and check the copyright page, to make sure it was published in the same universe you live in. It is also why, in despair, many publishers have turned to pushing porn, er… I mean paranormal romance (or heck, most romance) and outright “uh?” like Fifty Shades of Grey, because sex still sells. At least sort of.

But never mind all that – though it should be obvious to a blind man, at midnight, in a coal cellar.

What struck me about Walter’s article was his unshakeable certainty that he and other “progressives” are the way of the future.

Look, I know that’s what they’re taught in Europe. Well – I was taught that in Europe too. Unfortunately for my teachers, it was a bad idea to teach Marx to someone who read History in her free time, and Shakespeare for relaxation.

Why?

Because I knew that each era had a way of conceptualizing life and the cosmos by the “science” and “philosophy” of the time.
Thus the Victorians – like Marx – had great faith in science and what I’d call “social engineering” but not in the sense we use it. More in the sense that various parts of society constituted well-oiled parts, working in interlocking harmony.

Well… I could see the philosophy of the time all over Marxist ideas, like the idea of finite pie economics, the idea of an inevitable triumph of proletariat, the idea of proletariat: of people as widgets that fit into certain “classes”. Oh, come on. It was like the great drive to classify the natural world that did so much good in the Natural sciences. And also left us holding the bag on some particularly funny classifications, like pachyderms, which really have a lot less to do with each other than they thought.

Marx went splat a bit more because humans are a moving target, our culture and opinions ever moving, each generation reinventing the same things in a slightly different way. And economics was never a finite pie, which Marx might have known if he hadn’t cadged a living from Engels. Never mind.

I could see that the philosophy behind Marxism was already outdated. In the sixties and early seventies, we could already see that so many of the things Marx had predicted just had failed to materialize, that “classes” were ever harder to classify, that socialist paradises had a lot to hide behind the glitzy façade of the Soviet Life magazines sold at every street corner. I mean, I might not say it aloud, because I wanted to pass my classes and enter college, but no matter how much my teachers assured me that the Soviet Union was a beacon of civilization and the United States was like the Roman Decadence but not nearly as much fun, even I, at fourteen, knew which way people fled even at the price of leaving everything behind, including family.

Took me a long time to internalize it, though, because it’s hard to believe that everything you were taught (or almost everything) in school was a lie.

Since then Marxists have got more defensive, and spend most of their days explaining to us why every instance of Marxist failure is not real, and why socialism/communism/progressivism have never been tried.

Considering how much of their time this explaining takes up, it’s amazing that they still believe, unblinkingly that the future belongs to them and that it underlies things like their analysis that those who cling to their guns and religion their stories about monster hunters and spaceships are the outdated ones, instead of the incoming wave, ready to replace the tired and nihilistic view of the world fostered by that old dead white guy, Marx.

As we know indoctrination works. That and the fear of no longer being in step with the “good people.”

Which means that they don’t even think about the likelihood that the future isn’t “queer” or “feminist” or belongs to the classes that the new Marxists have decided are downtrodden, in place of the “proletariat” that disappointed them by getting cars and homes of their own and wanting to be well off more than they wanted proletarian revolution. (And before one or several of you comes and beats up on me because these people really are “downtrodden” – Quatsch. Yes, yes, victimhood, etc, but most people have at least one characteristic that was discriminated against at one time or another somewhere or other. Yes, there are broad classes of people who were very badly treated by Western civilization and who are still badly treated by every other civilization. But people aren’t “classes” of people, and being a victim is ultimately a matter of choice. Are there people who look down on me because I’m female and have an accent? Yep. And most of the ones I’ve run into are “progressive” but never mind. I am me, and not “designated victim of the week” and most people eventually figure that or they’re too stupid to live, and I don’t care.)

Anyway, “progressives” are absolutely sure that the future is somehow not-capitalist (even though capitalism is not so much a system as what people default to, and breaks through even in the most totalitarian of systems, under the guise of the black market), and belongs to whatever the minority of the day is. Even though there is no proof of this. And they’re convinced that white people are losing “privilege” (does Harry Reid look like he’s looking anything to you? No? Nancy Pelosi?) and therefore are “scared.” (Okay, Bill Clinton does look scared, but that’s because I think he knows he’s getting too old for random tosses in the hay.)

Like the long dead nineteenth century white men whose philosophy they parrot unthinkingly, they view civilization as having a direction, and – in a leap of faith – see it as moving in the way they want it to.

Considering the wonders their beliefs have done for sf book circulation and, more materially, for the economies of Europe and the United States or the standard of living in Cuba, say, this is faith indeed, faith that challenges reality. It is also of course, a sign of undigested and unexamined beliefs.

So if they can look at science fiction – which has been mostly female for at least twenty years – and see it as a long slog of the downtrodden, if they can look at a field that has lionized every writer of color who was willing to parrot the party line, and see white male supremacy… well, they’re not at war with us. They’re at war with reality.

But they never give up, because they were told history comes with a “this end up” arrow and theirs is the end that is up.

Yet, when I made the journey from the left in my mid-thirties, I found it very freeing. What we forget is what a dank no-hope philosophy Marxism is. The idea of a finite pie leads inexorably to the idea that fewer humans is better and no humans best, and eventually to self hatred and hatred of humanity. And the idea of classes and that the better off are better off because they took advantage of the system or were born with “privilege” makes you envy everyone better off than you, a destructive emotion at best. It also leads to guilt about every good thing you have. And to fantasies about a future in which all the good things go away.

It was a revelation, suddenly, to realize that it wasn’t scripted that we’d overpopulate the world and destroy ourselves; it wasn’t scripted that third world cultures would win out and that the future would be poorer and harsher than the present; it wasn’t scripted that crime would always increase, and human life become cheaper. It wasn’t true that the future was like Soylent Green but less fun.

None of it was scripted. There was no arrow saying “this way up” in history. I was free to hold what elements of the past I wanted, and to give up the ones I wanted. I could work towards a better future. I was free to think whatever I wanted without fears of being excommunicated.

I think people who cling to their Marx and Engels accuse us of being afraid, but I think they’re the ones who are afraid. Afraid everything they “know” is wrong. Look, we’re not the ones excommunicating people who cross over. Like the old Soviet Union versus the United States, movement is much greater in the direction from “progressivism” to “freedom” and when movement in the other direction takes place, we might wonder what happened, but we don’t obsess about it, and we don’t character-assassinate. We talk back to them, sure, but we don’t spend our time calling them names. (Oh, fine, I called Damien Walter short or at least juvenile, but note I said he just gives me that impression. For all I know he’s seven feet tall and doesn’t even like lollipops.)

They do. Because unless they keep that fence of rigid belief around the herd, that certainty that it’s their way or the highway, and their demands that you fall in line or “shut up and go away”; unless they metaphorically stone everyone who walks away or dares to disagree with them publically, people who’ve been indoctrinated just might smell the freedom outside and realize none of these dismal predictions are “inevitable.” They might realize that the future is theirs to create. And that they did build that. And that there’s nothing sacred about victimhood. And that they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in a world that is an infinite pie.

And then, they will be done.

I’m Tired – Dave Pascoe

I’m tired. That should really not be a surprise, as Wee Dave (all names and heights have been changed to protect the not-yet-two-week-old spawnling) is doing as the newborn do, and ensuring his parents are running on the not-quite-ragged edge. Mrs. Dave is doing well, and healing well. Wee Dave put on more’n half a pound (and a whole inch) in the week prior to his last pediatrician appointment, and drinks his meals like a champion quaffer (though more lands in his black hole of a stomach than around him, thank Glod) and belches like same after. We’ll see what he’s up to on the morrow. We’re slowly crafting a routine around our slightly larger family, and it’s quite the experience. I recommend it, if only because – when you do it right – it’ll boil away all of your pretenses and you’ll know what you’re made of. Hopefully it’s not cheese.

But more seriously, I’m tired. Of the foolishness I see in the world. Publishers mobilizing the authors they keep in quasi-slavery in order to attack the one entity that can mean their freedom. The fact that NOBODY is really stepping up to challenge that entity. Sure, there’s competition. Of a sort. But it’s smaller companies doing the same thing in not-quite-as-good a way, and so doomed to squabble over the scraps.

I’m tired of a marketplace geared around gigantic corporations, and a body of legislation geared toward making sure such large (and deep-pocketed) corporations have unnecessary advantages in said marketplace. Where a small group inordinately powerful people, living and working in the same small (yet inordinately powerful) place at the same job, can levy an outsized influence on a readership with whom they have almost nothing in common.

I’m tired of an internet where wastes of flesh can print the most horrible lies about my friends, and influence the weak-willed and weak-minded against people I care about, all from the relative comfort of their distant virtual anonymity. And I’m tired of having friends on different sides of the dispute, and not knowing how to deal with that.

On the larger stage, I’m very, very tired of an oligarchy trying to run my country to their own twisted ends. We’re coming up to an election season. Another election season, and one where one faction seems poised to take away the legislature from the other. Or, as they seem to have done more than once, yank defeat from the jaws of victory. We have a supreme executive who flagrantly flouts the law of the land, and nobody (*cough*the aforementioned legislature*cough*) does nothing to hold him to account. Where he frees enemy combatants on his own recognizance because doing a thing quickly was more important than doing it as the law prescribes. And when he leaves office? In the words of the as-yet-immortal Mr. Slant, Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca! I fully expect the next Placeholder of the United States to act as disgracefully as the current stuffed shirt.

So, yeah: this is me in a tired place.

Fortunately, that’s *mostly* just what it is.

And despair is a sin.

Look, SpaceX just unveiled its manned space module, the Dragon v2. It’s pretty. And on top of that, Sierra Nevada Corporation Space Systems’ Dream Chaser vehicle has completed the latest round of NASA certifications. Not to be left out, Virgin Galactic announced they’ve begun the process to get FAA certification for commercial space flights out of a New Mexico launch facility. Of course, what I’d like happen is a re-opening of the NERVA project, but then, I’m of the opinion that nuclear power has come a long way in the last several decades, and it’s the best way to move forward. So, we have private industry thumbing its collective nose at the only extant superpower and a wannabe-usetabe global heavyweight, and putting Americans back in space. Closer to where most of us live, we have options, for the first time in decades, of who we do business with.

And everywhere there’s new life, and new minds to mold. And we now have the means to do it, in a way we haven’t for years and years. Maybe we’re doing all right, after all.

*I should have posted this last night, but I woke up with the world’s worse sinus headache, and by the time it was gone, I had stuff that I needed to do.  Sorry.  It was mostly written from last week, but not quite.  So now I’ve finished it. The chapter, not the book!*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — is now up on Amazon.

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday.  If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format.  I think it will probably take another three months to finish.  Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game.  It hasn’t happened yet.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Lady Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage

The child’s hand was moist in mine, and had overheated feeling children get when they’re in a panic.

I’m not good with children. It’s not as though I don’t like them. I suppose there could be a child I liked well enough, except that I’d never met him or her. My nurse said I just didn’t like my younger siblings, or at least I was annoyed by them which is perfectly normal. Or at least Nurse said so. Of course she also said when we were all grown up we’d be the best of friends, which just meant to me that she really hadn’t looked at my sisters too closely, because how anyone could be best friends with sickly sweetly Harmony was beyond me.

But I could imagine, in some distant future that I might, perhaps, get married, and if my children didn’t take after my siblings, I might even like them and wish to spend time with them. Perhaps.

Still it made me nervous to be the only adult and have this confiding little boy with his dark, curly hair and green eyes. It should make me nervous, of course. We were in fairyland, which meant he’d probably turn into a dragon or an ogre, or turn out to feed only on human eyes, or something equally disgusting.

I held his hand gingerly, thought it seemed no more disgusting than the average child’s hand. He smelled the same way. I mean, like an average child about that age. For some reason children around that age always smell to me like pastry and pencil shavings.

“Where do you live?” I asked. I kept in mind that on the paths of fairyland, you must help three people in need before you find your way home. “I mean, how can I help you?”

He turned green, intent eyes on me, and made me frown, because his eyes reminded me far too closely of Seraphim Ainsling’s the prince consort’s.

“I… I don’t know,” he said.

“How can you not know?” I wasn’t ready to give up the idea that he might be some kind of eye-eating monster.

He smiled at that and spoke with the suavity of an older man, which of course, might very well mean he was an eye-eater. “Very easily, madam,” he said. “I simply don’t remember.”

“Why not?” I asked him. I was not so trusting that I would take him at his word. Nurse always said that part of the reason the younger ones didn’t like me was that – in her words – I crammed them, as one would a horse. I cornered and asked them questions, and didn’t observe any sort of protocol or delicacy.

The problem, you see, is that I remember being their age. I think most adults don’t. Most adults go weak at the thought of a lost six year old, but I remembered very well being six, and the things I could connive and contrive were as bad – if not worse – than what any adult could think on. And I remembered that being asked direct questions, that didn’t assume I was a little simpering dolt, didn’t allow me time to make up cover stories.

His hand twitched in mine, and for a moment I thought he’d run away. But then he said, in a voice that sounded much, much older. “I don’t know, you know? I have a strong feeling I forgot it on purpose.”

“Oh,” I said. This, despite his much more adult voice, resonated with me. You see, I had been almost there. Not quite. But close enough. I’d never willingly forgotten who I was or where I was or for my sins, where home was. But I’d spent a good part of my childhood daydreaming about being just about anyone else. And I don’t mean by this I fantasized about being the Princess Royal, who was then lost. Oh, I did that too. I suppose every girl about my age did. I knew objectively I was younger than the lost princess, and I knew I looked like Jonathan. At least my features did, if not my color. But I could pretend I’d been hidden by magic, kept like Sleeping Beauty, from the world and from aging. And even that my appearance was contrived. Besides, the queen was dark as I was.

But those were dreams every girl had, when lessons were difficult or one’s nurse or Mama said one shouldn’t do something. I had others. And by others I mean I fantasized being everyone, and everyone’s lot seemed better than mine. The begging girl at the corner would, as I knew, having been instructed to give alms and feel compassion, often go hungry and cold, and even suffer the brutality of passerbyes. But few, even beggers, would go through life with the pretense of love.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell it, and when I say it it sounds quite foolish, but I think it would have been better for all concerned if Papa had told us aloud, over breakfast, that he disliked the lot of us and had only sired us because it was what one did. And it would have been better if he then washed his hands of us, giving us the minimal to survive and letting us grow up quite wild and unsupervised.

Just as it would have been better if Mama had said she only loved Harmony and Honoria, and the rest of us could go to the devil, for all she cared.

The problem was not that they didn’t love me. I suspect a lot of people, all the pious stories notwithstanding, grow up without having anyone who feels more than duty towards them. And mama and papa might be incapable of loving anyone, which I supposed was not their fault. Mama tolerated the children who most resembled them and she was pleased to think she loved them, and that was not her fault either.

But why must they and all of society conspire to pretend they loved me. It was all “you must show great gratitude to your father for how kind and generous he is to you.” I promise you, I’d rather have been beaten. And it was that feeling that made me want to be anyone else, to slip out of my existence as if I’d never been, and to go… elsewhere.

I’d done it at last too, hadn’t I? And what a fine mess I’d done of it.

“You understand it then?” he asked. “Wanting to run away? Wanting to forget everything you were? Everyone you were.”

“I understand running away,” I said. “But not forgetting. I couldn’t make myself forget if I tried.”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowed, and though his voice was that of a six year old, I had the feeling that he was much, much, much older, as he said, “I could make you forget.”

“Oh,” I said, and let go of his hand and for a moment I almost ran away, because it occurred to me maybe he didn’t eat eyes, but memories.

He looked appalled, as though not sure what he’d said, or why it made me so scared. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that unless you asked me. But you said, you couldn’t make yourself forget and I—”

“And you?”

“I thought I’d oblige you. But you don’t really want to forget do you?”

“Not everything,” I said, reluctantly. I didn’t want to forget Jonathan’s visits to the schoolroom when I was little. I remembered the warmth in them. Or this one time I’d seen a pantomime on pirates, when I was very little and it had seemed to me an enchanted realm. Or the times I’d spent reading, by the fire, on long winter evenings. “To forget everything would mean to lose what you are. I don’t think anyone wants to do that.”

He blinked up at me. “I think I did.” The image of him wavered and fluttered before my eyes, and for a moment I had the image of a much older man, and a feeling I knew him too. “I think…” He frowned a little. “It’s a lot like being a mosaic, you see.”

“Your memories?” I asked.

He started to shake his head, then shrugged. “Imagine that you were taken and broken, and scattered to the four winds and that your pieces were gathered again but with a lot of other pieces, a lot of memories that aren’t yours, that can’t be fit into what you remember, that … that are things you couldn’t or would never do, and yet it all mixes him, and you remember them as if you did it.”

His form had now solidified into a man in his twenties, and he looked like Darkwater, and I thought the prince consort had a brother, the king of fairyland. I said, my voice trembling a little, “It must have been sore unpleasant, your majesty.”

I expected him to vanish on that, since it seems to be in fairyland no one likes to be revealed. But he just frowned at me, and smiled a little and said, “Yes, I think I am, and you can’t imagine unpleasant. It comes with the burden of the memories of everyone who was ever the king. Which is why the king of fairyland is immortal. And more often than not insane.” He ran his hand across his brow, in a gesture I’d seen Darkwater make. “I’m not here. Not me. I mean, not all of me. And I don’t mean just as king. I’m not even here, all myself, as human. But it’s enough to know. I remember. And I remember there is a reason I did this, beyond… beyond my wish to vanish. There was an attack. They can’t capture fairyland till they’ve captured me, because I am fairyland, so I made myself many. But… the young one was unadvisable. He longed for home.”

My mind had made one of those leaps it makes sometimes “You were under attack by the mythworld,” I said. “The gods are looking for power, for… something to do with misfits.”

“Misfits?” he said. And then, “Oh, dear.”

His eyes seemed to grow. I don’t know how to explain it but suddenly there was a green portal, shining with an odd light, and I tumbled into it, head first. The last words I heard were, “This should at least keep one of you safe.”

Happy Saturday, friends and neighbors! Apparently I griped so much about having no books to promote last week that you lovely people decided to give me plenty this time! We have several new books from familiar faces and the first from a recent addition to the Hunnish tribe. A quick note: I’ve included TXRed’s first book because it will be on sale to help promote the sequel, which has just been released. So go, oh mighty Huns, and buy books! Read them! Enjoy them! Once you’ve enjoyed them, go leave reviews and mention the books to your friends! If you didn’t enjoy them, well, just keep it to yourself. *grin* You all seemed very generous with your feedback on covers, marketing, etc. a couple of weeks ago, and I encourage you to continue to help your colleagues that way. Money and input, input and money. As always, future entries for the promo post can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Data Herder and Mercenary Wordsmith, who’s fond of scenic coast lines but never quite pines for the fjords

Alma Boykin

Elizabeth of Starland (The Colplatschki Chronicles)

Stubborn as a mule? No, stubborn AND her mule.

Colonial Plantation LTD. abandoned ColPlat XI, writing the planet off as a tax loss after a series of severe Carrington-type events. Now, four hundred years later, Laurence V of Frankonia wants to write Elizabeth von Sarmas out of his kingdom, but like her Lander ancestors, Elizabeth refuses to roll over and die.

To survive, she needs to cross the continent, thread her way through a holy war, and find friends in the Eastern Empire—an impossible task for a sheltered gentlewoman. Or is it? Never underestimate a woman with a mission and a mule.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble

Elizabeth of Donatello Bend (The Colplatschki Chronicles)

Elizabeth won. Now what?

Elizabeth von Sarmas just thought things would get easier. Now she’s faced with managing her late enemy’s lands and winning its residents back to the Babenburgs, while finding out where all the estate’s money went. While balancing diplomatic duties, her vows as a poltulant of Godown, and learning how to command men in formal battle. The Eastern Empire’s enemies don’t intend to let her rest. And while she makes some new friends, she also earns the hatred of an enemy far more dangerous than anyone can imagine.

No even Snowy the Killer Mule is going to be able to keep her out of trouble this time. Trust in Godown—but keep a loaded crossbow.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble

Pam Uphoff

Dancer (Wine of the Gods)

A year ago, Rael Withione was one of the elite. A Presidential Guard. Now she’s a handicapped hero, going home to finish her recuperation, and hoping to achieve average. She wasn’t planning on dealing with a new illegal drug nor a murder that is much too close to home.

R. Modena & A.C. Extarian

United Fleet: The Right Place

The year is Ct2293 and humanity’s advancement has started to expand to the stars. Earth’s last military has made a discovery that is deemed impossible – potentially rocking everything humanity has known. United Fleet scientist Ensign Sharyn Cameron is put to the case when she meets Judas Extarian, a guard working in a nearby Ci-Tek building. Extarian’s boredom with his life and work comes to an end when Ensign Cameron comes to him for help with a problem – and both of them end up with more questions that neither of them can answer. Clues point to the building that Extarian is tasked to guard. To get the answers might cost them both everything they’ve worked for in their lives, especially when the only other guard dies under suspicious circumstances. Maybe New Adelaide isn’t as boring as Extarian thought it was.

This book is also available through Lulu.

James Young

After the Scythe (Scythefall)

For the people of Newton’s Village, the end of the world was just the beginning. The town’s denizens thought they’d witnessed the worst in humanity when all hell broke loose on the night the president announced the imminent arrival of the asteroid Scythe. Four weeks later, after Scythefall killed almost a third of the nation, they are about to find out just how wrong they were. After the Scythe is the story of every day people’s sacrifice and resolve in a struggle against desperation, violence and lawlessness.

Woelf Dietrich

The Seals of Abgal (A Guardians of the Seals Tale)

Bookstore owner and novice antiquarian Sebastian Kaine is proud of his new profession and even prouder still of the collection of antique books on the occult that he keeps locked away in the basement of his bookstore. But his little utopia is shattered one night when he wakes up in that same basement, bound and bloodied, and his prized collection all but destroyed.

Making matters worse are the two strange men responsible for the carnage. They want The Seals of Abgal and insist Sebastian is in possession of it. Though he denies having any knowledge of the book, Sebastian soon finds himself at the receiving end of a brutal interrogation – one, he fears, he may not survive.

As he tries to stay alive, Sebastian discovers that The Seals of Abgal is far more than just an ordinary grimoire. It holds powerful secrets, secrets that are older than time itself, and the men searching for it are no ordinary thugs.

But then, Sebastian is no ordinary bookseller.

Also available from these fine, not-so-mysterious booksellers:

• Gumroad
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes

*I don’t mean to run consecutive guest posts, though I am working and am therefore running more guests than usual.  But Tom wrote this, and as you see there’s a reason to run it today.*

Beyond the violence -Tom Knighton

Two years. At once, it sounds like forever ago while also being just a blink of an eye. That’s what loss is like, though.

Let me back up. Some here know this, because I talked about it a couple of days ago, but some may not. Two years ago, on May 30, 2012, one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known was taken from the world.

A man named Ian Stalwicki walked into the Café Racer in Seattle, Washington. He had apparently been a bit of a problem, and was asked to leave. Stalwicki turned to walk out, but before he left, he drew out two .45 semiautomatic pistols and opened fire.

Stalwicki killed five people in the café, and another outside while trying to carjack a getaway vehicle. One of those victims inside the café was Kimberly Lynn Layfield, or Kim as we all knew her.

Kim was an amazing woman. Of all the people who graduated from us at Riverview Academy, she was one of the few who never let go of her dreams. Riverview was small, mostly working class families, so we weren’t rich kids by any means. Most of our classmates dreamed to take over their family businesses, or maybe a good job here in town. Kim was different. She dreamed of being an actress.

She was still pursuing that dream when Stalwicki ended her life. I remember reading the word on Facebook of all places, and it feels like yesterday. I remember breaking down at my desk, eventually collapsing on the floor in absolute tears. Of us all, Kim was among the best of what we all should have been.

It didn’t take long before the questions start. Some are normal, like “why her?” Kim was among the most beautiful girls in our school, yet she spurned opportunities to be one of the “popular” kids, and instead said she preferred the company of we less than popular folks. She was the kind of person who this world desperately needs.

Probably the most shocking question to me was “Have I been wrong about guns all this time?”

You see, I’m a gun nut. Absolutely fascinated with them and everything about them. I never turn down an opportunity to shoot something new, and generally don’t turn down an opportunity to shoot something I’ve shot before either. Yet, here I was, wondering if I was wrong about the entire Second Amendment.

That’s how I can forgive people in California who are questioning the Second Amendment. They’re not even gun people, so of course they’re going to question it.

I can forgive them for questioning the Second Amendment. It doesn’t make it any less stupid than when I did it.

You see, it didn’t take me long to remember that Ian Stalwicki was to blame for Kim’s murder and the murder of five other people. He committed the crime, not the gun.

Guns are tools. They have legitimate purposes, not unlike the knife Elliot Rodger used to slaughter three men in his apartment before leaving home to begin his rampage in earnest.

Some will argue that guns are only meant for killing. Honestly, that must mean I’ve been horribly misusing mine. I mean, most of mine have only been used for punching holes in paper. Of course, there are the ones I’ve taken deer hunting, so I guess you could call that “killing”, but I think we all know what the anti-gun crowd is talking about.

Guns are tools. Yes, they are tools that can also kill, but the same can be said about a machete or an axe. More importantly, however, they are tools that enable a weaker person to defend themselves from a stronger one.

Of course, the Left likes to argue that there are alternatives to guns for self defense. They’re deluding themselves, but they argue it. They think things like rape whistles, pepper spray, and self defense classes are effective alternatives.

Rape whistles don’t do any good unless there’s someone nearby to hear it. Since attackers tend to like to seek out their prey in places without a lot of people, the flaw in this plan is self explanatory.

Pepper spray can be effective…on some people. Others can shrug it off. In fact, one can actually build up a tolerance to pepper spray.

Self defense classes aren’t completely awful, except for the fact that most such classes only last a few weeks. It limits how much useful information someone can possibly get.

What your average Leftist misses is that criminals aren’t hobbyists. They’re in it for the career. That means they’re not as stupid as some might prefer to believe. Many have spent their entire lives working towards their criminal behavior. They’re good at it.

Like most people who make a career out of something, they spend time to be as good at something as they can be. Some will spend time building a tolerance toward pepper spray. Some will be bigger and stronger than their prey (and that includes both men and women, for the record). Others will just know how to beat someone down.

You know what they can’t condition themselves for? A bullet between the eyes.

There was an old saying. “God made all men. Sam Colt made all men equal.” It was an advertising slogan, but an incredibly accurate one, though “men” is the more general term for people. (Got to throw that out before the feminists attack me for believing only people with a penis should be able to defend themselves or something)

The firearm is the only tool that you can effectively rely on to protect yourself with.

Will bad people use it for bad things? Sure. However, as Elliot Rodger showed us, cars and knives can be used for bad things too. After all, he used both to hurt people. However, they’re not as scary to a lefty as a gun is.

Guns aren’t the problem. They never have been. Even Michael Moore will point out that Canada has tons of guns as well, and they even play the same video games, watch the same movies, and even the same television shows. However, Canada isn’t the United States. For all of the wonderful things we are as a nation, there’s something that makes sick people go nuts from time to time and kill a lot of people in the process.

Discussion of the actual causes would take a lifetime. The truth of the matter is that it doesn’t matter. The actual causes become irrelevant because we’re too busy having to defend against things that had no relevance to the act.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t ascribe maliciousness to things leftists do. Even if a few wring their hands with malignant glee, most are just people who really do think that leftist policies are what’s best for this country. Unfortunately, those same people don’t realize that they’re obstructing us from really talking about the causes of these crimes. They’re distracting us from the discussion we need to be having.

Bad thing happen. There’s only so much we can do to mitigate bad things happening. You can legislate until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t stop crazy. You can’t stop evil. You stop the bad things of the universe from reaching out and making life horrible from time to time.

So here’s something for the leftists who really want to do what they can to prevent the next one of these events from happening. How about you all stop with your self-righteous crap about how the NRA has blood on its hands when your side will all but literally stand on the bodies of dead children to politicize any tragedy just because they know it’s the only damn way they’ll ever get any movement on guns.

Accept it. It’s a lost cause for you. If you couldn’t get a change in gun laws like you wanted after Newtown, you’re not going to get it. It’s just not going to happen. Why not spend that energy and money (I’m talking to YOU, Michael Bloomberg) on something that can actually make a meaningful difference, like something that would look at the real causes.

Not that it’s going to happen. Too many people are invested in this lost cause to take a step back and try anything else. That might actually make the world a better place. Can’t have that, now can we?

Save me from the New York state of mind-Amanda Green

Schools. Institutions of learning and nurturing. Places where our kids go to learn socialization and skills they can use as they grow up. The training ground of our younger generation so they can help make the world a better place. Riiiiight.

Schools today have abdicated their role as institutes of learning. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow process. I can’t even say where it started, not for the nation as a whole. Here in Texas, it started when state and federal mandates made it impossible for teachers to teach. Lesson plans suddenly had to be approved first by the department chair and then by the administration. Now, in many districts, lesson plans come from Admin and are filtered down.

Oh, the supporters of this say it is a way to guarantee all our children get the same education. The problem with this is that our kids aren’t all the same. They don’t learn the same ways and they don’t learn at the same rate. That, in essence, is the heart of the first problem of education. Teachers can no longer adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of the individual students. Oh, technically they can, but they have to go through so many administrative hoops that, by the time the deviation from the plan is approved, the harm as has been done. Either it is too late and the semester is over or the kid is so bored or so lost that there is no hope of getting him back.

Then there came the standardized tests that became a major part of the grades. Down here they were called TAAS and TAKS and TEEKS and who knows what other names. Most parents and teachers called tem useless. The tests took away from teaching time because school funding, and teachers’ jobs, were tied to how well students did on these tests. So district after district took to teaching to the test – and teaching how to take the test – instead of teaching what kids needed to learn to be successful adults.

Watered down curricula led to watered down grading systems. Some districts outlawed homework. Teachers had to give students enough time to do their assignments in class. IF there was homework, it wasn’t to be graded. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was in school, especially before I started thinking about college, if I didn’t have to do homework, I didn’t do it. Following close on the heels of that were the districts that made test grades transient. By that I mean students would be allowed to take a test over and over again until they got the grade they wanted. Forget about the extra work this made for the teacher. Forget about the fact it took away from teaching time because you had to review the material with the student who decided it was more important to go out and mess around than study for the test. Most of all, forget about teaching our kids that there are consequences for their actions or inactions.

Then came the Feds to tell schools what sort of drinks and snacks they could or could not have in the vending machines at their schools. Okay, I get that the Feds meant well. But I don’t need the government telling me what I – or my child – can eat or drink. Nor do I need the Feds taking away money makers from the schools and not replacing that money. Why? Because it means school taxes will go up. Schools sought a middle ground which worked for awhile. The vending machines would be placed in areas like the lunchroom that could be locked off during most of the school day. That worked for a bit and then the Feds said “no”. All bad stuff had to be gone from the premises.

The food police rode in. Students are expelled for bringing peanut butter sandwiches to school because someone might be allergic. The First Lady has made it her mission to make all our kids into “healthy eaters”. I’m sorry, not her job. I repeat: That is not her job. I remember the days when my son wouldn’t eat anything but peanut butter or pizza or any one of several other items. If I didn’t have the option of sending what he’d eat with him to school for lunch, well, he just wouldn’t have eaten. He didn’t care if the First Lady said something was good for him. All he wanted was what tasted good and I guarantee you that wasn’t a salad or broccoli.

Now we have the schools fat shaming our kids. I remember when the President’s Council on Physical Fitness became big back in the 60’s. We had thing like recess where we ran and played. Sure, there was the occasional skinned knee or sprained ankle. But we had fun, ran off energy so we could pay attention in class and we burned off the calories. We weren’t wrapped in cotton wool and protected from falls or bumps and scrapes. The only time we didn’t go outside for recess was if it was raining or too cold. Since this is Texas, that didn’t happen very often.

But our society has turned into a bunch of wimps. If there is the slightest possibility that a kid might get his feelings hurt or have a hangnail, it isn’t allowed on the playground. I’m not talking about bullying. I’m talking about being picked last in a team sport or even just keeping score. We’re teaching out kids that they are all winners and, I hate to tell you this, but they aren’t. At least they aren’t in everything. If we don’t let our kids see and experience failure as they grow up, they won’t be able to deal with it when they become adults.

Don’t think that will be a problem? Google “affluenza” and then tell me that we don’t face problems when kids aren’t taught the consequences of their actions.

Now, throw in politicians like good ole Bloomberg who banned oversized sodas because there are too many people with weight problems. His reasoning was that no one needed to buy that much soda at one time. Well, I hate to tell him this but, if someone wants that much soda, they will buy it, whether it is in one big cup or in a refillable smaller cup. Besides, who is he to tell anyone how much soda they should or should not drink?

Oh, I know. He’s also the politician who is making it his new life’s mission to disarm the citizens of this country. Funny, I have a feeling he’d scream pretty damned loudly if that meant his own personal bodyguards had to give up their guns too.

Or maybe it is just New York craziness. After all, it is the New York Department of Education that sent home “fitnessgrams” to students not so long ago. These fitnessgrams, based loosely on a program out of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, reported the students’ BMI and noted whether or not the students were overweight. Most of us probably wouldn’t have heard anything about it except for one 9 year old girl who is anything but overweight.

A bit of background. In November, students were measured and weighed. This included Gwendolyn Williams. At 9 years old, she stands 4’1” and weighs 66 pounds. She is also a typical kid. Given the Fitnessgram and told not to look, well, it was too tempting not to do just that. Especially since the Fitnessgram was sealed only with a small sticker that could easily be put back in place. So Gwendolyn, like so many other kids, looked.

Fortunately, when she saw the notation that she was overweight and needed to consult a physician, the girl didn’t have any body issues. In fact, she seems to have her head on pretty straight. Even more fortunate, her mother didn’t take the notice lying down and she went to see her daughter’s principal the next day. And here is where you really have to wonder if we aren’t living in a warped version – more warped version? – of the Twilight Zone. Instead of expressing outrage over what the Fitnessgram said, the principal noted that Gwendolyn had been told not to open it. So, let’s shift the blame to the kid again.

Here’s my problem with all this. First, it is obvious the girl isn’t overweight. More than that, she is active and healthy. Yet the NY Department of Education is using a questionable test to tell her the exact opposite. PE teachers are measuring, weighing and taking the heights of their students and this is what these reports are based on. There is, to my knowledge, no physical activity portion of the test – something that is now included in the Cooper Institute’s fitness program and FitnessGram. Worse, with the NY Department of Education “rethinking” the FitnessGram, it isn’t rethinking how it is being used or administered. No, it is only rethinking the fact that maybe it isn’t a good thing to send it home with students. They are looking at other ways to get the information out to the parents.

Head meet wall. Better yet, their heads need to meet walls many times.

We condemn magazines and video ads for their unrealistic portrayal of bodies, especially women’s bodies. Yet no one in the so-called Department of Education seems to see a problem with labelling perfectly fit and normal kids, male and female, overweight or obese. They don’t recognize the potential problems this sort of thing can bring on the kids. Nor do they realize this is, in its own way, a form of bullying. “You don’t meet our standards, so we are going to call you names and tell you how bad you are/how badly you are raising your kids.”

There has to come a time when we finally say “enough is enough”. Surely that time has come. As parents, we need to take back the parenting of our kids. It isn’t up to the state to raise them for us nor is it for the schools. Common sense has a place in our lives and in our education. The home school movement is continuing to grow because of the idiocy happening in our schools. Unfortunately, not every family is equipped to homeschool. I’m not sure what the answer is but, whatever it is, it needs to come soon before we have yet another generation of kids who don’t understand that there are consequences to their actions, that they aren’t going to excel at everything they do and that they can make their own decisions about what to do with their lives – including what they eat and drink. It will then be up to them to live with the consequences of their choices.

So, I was listening to Waldo and Magic yesterday (by Robert A. Heinlein) while I did some stuff around the house. I have to listen to a book while cleaning/packing because, you see, otherwise I get bored. And when I get bored I wander off and things are left undone. So, I was listening to the book and doing stuff, and was charmed in Waldo (mild spoilers) by the notion that we set reality. What we believed was true. Before Galileo’s theories (He wasn’t the first one) were accepted the Earth was at the center of the universe and flat and the sun was a light in the sky, and you could touch the sky from the highest mountain. With a ladder.

There is something oddly comforting in thinking that all the perplexities of the universe, all the complications of our current existence, are all of them in our mind, and we could wish them differently.

Yes, I know there is some support for the idea that our mind affects more than should rationally be possible. There might be a basis for faith healing and, yep, the whole universe might be a hologram affected by the mind – BUT NOT LIKE THAT. (Which is too bad because if it were, we could totally decide the solar system planets were habitable, and we could have colonies on the moon this year. Pasturing cattle. Never mind.)

But influenced by the mind or not, reality both of the world and the human mind has hard edges that won’t bend or soften because we want it to.

There are inflexible laws to both how external reality works and how internal reality works. Things don’t happen just because you close your eyes and believe really hard. And people really believe that, modern people, like us. Take, for instance DNC attendees convinced they could levitate the Denver Mint.)

The thing we have to remember is that this doesn’t mean these people are stupid, or even mentally ill in the classical sense. Their issue is closer to Reagan’s “they know so many things that just aren’t so.” And to an extent that’s because the Geeks have inherited the Earth. And to an extent it is because communism fell.

To explain: I used to wonder if magic had ever worked, because why would our ancestor, living tight, close to the bone, and lives of really loud desperation (compared to us) invest so much time in something that never paid off.

This question is not exactly true. It did pay off to an extent, physically, since a lot of natural healing, or other basic but weird learning went under the name of “magic” and those parts worked. What I underestimated and what I am slowly coming to understand, in the face of the insanity of feminists, in SFWA and out, in the face of the insanity of communists because “this time it will work” and in the face of the summer of recovery two and three and four and five and… which people still believe in, is that such beliefs even when they didn’t work, worked.

The world has always been too hard for some percentage of humans. The mind has always been unable to face reality naked. What I mean is, for those of us who believe in something more, it’s easy to say “He won’t give me more than I can handle,” but what about the others? What about those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing but humans, nothing but the naked human mind and the uncaring universe. I don’t mean the ones who have some measure of doubt. All of us, even the most faith-filled have some measure of doubt, and the measure changes through the days and years – I mean the ones who were brought up to believe that anything religious is crazy talk. The ones who try to be “sane” in a peculiar way no human has ever quite managed.

I normally don’t bring religion into these posts, but given the theme, it behooves us to remember that a very wise rabbi who might or might not have been something else said “Man doesn’t live from bread alone.” Even if it’s not your belief or your tradition, you have to acknowledge the wisdom in it. It has taken me years to figure it out.

Most ancient religions were magic. Most primitive religions were magic. It seems to be the base setting of human belief, something along the lines of “I pull this lever and supernatural being dances to my command.” This is something that the more sophisticated and modern churches fight against constantly, because in modern religion, it is still a temptation.

When you remove the more sophisticated religion from the choices for (eh) sophisticated humans, and when those humans aren’t sophisticated enough to face the world with a naked mind (and most people aren’t) you get magic again.

Only this time because the Geeks have conquered the Earth, we get magic with a justification. They know just enough about a quantum universe and the crazier theories at the fringe of science, and they’ve read Diana Wynne Jones or similar, where magic will work on Earth if enough people believe it. They know just enough to convince their sophisticated minds that this time, if we believe enough it will work.

Why this is suddenly, incredibly important (and the reason why mainstream publishing has for decades been pushing fantasy over science fiction – not as a plan, but as a coping mechanism for themselves) is that communism fell. Their “religion” fell. It was proven false.

In the early nineties European communists looked dazed, as the truth about the Soviet Union came out. They stumbled around like living dead.

American communists were more insulated because our papers never published the full insanity and evil that went on in communist countries.

There were a lot more communists in America than you think, and many who didn’t (still don’t) know they’re communist. What they want is indistinguishable from the program of CPUSA, but they don’t know it. They think it’s only “logical” and “sensible” and what “all good people think.” This is because they were taught this by parents, grandparents, schools.

The point is they can’t face it. They can’t face the history that Marxism has failed everywhere it was tried. (Yesterday I read an article about Marxism and how Marx’s theory of immiseration has failed miserably and even Marx would laugh at the sorry asses of modern “Marxists” but I can’t find it. If any of you read it, throw me a link? I didn’t even know that, of course, because my teachers had bought into “third world immiseration” — which doesn’t make any sense, not even remotely, because their lives have been getting better too, unless their local leaders are communists, in which case it functions as well as for everyone else. Salamandyr found it  and here’s the link.) Instead they put hands in ears and go “this time will be different.”

This is because they believe in magic. Oh, most of them, unless they are hard core fans, are not so silly that they CALL it magic and most of them wouldn’t try to do something so stupid as to try to levitate the Denver Mint.

But they believe in magic nonetheless, at the gut level where it might be impossible to eradicate it from the human psyche except with the aid of the more evolved religions.

They believe in magic at the level of “if we do what’s ‘right’” then the right things will happen. Except what they believe is right is part of the religion of Marxism or one of the curious subsets that have emerged, such as radical feminism or “downtrodden race supremacy.”

In this universe, while it’s completely crazy to raise taxes in a recession, it’s still the “right” thing from a moral point of view, because finite pie, and everything the rich stole belongs to us. (The idea of “You didn’t create that” goes deep. They literally don’t think it’s possible to create wealth.) And while the idea of killing 90% of men or preventing 90% of baby boys from being born is not only abhorrent to us, but self-obviously would create hell on earth, it’s the “right” thing to do and therefore doing it should bring rewards they’ve learned to expect.

To us this is heinous, to them it’s an article of faith.  If you truly believe women are naturally superior and more peaceful (yay, magic vaginas!) then NOT making sure 90% of humanity are female would be evil.  And they truly believe this.  It only requires them to ignore EVERY real woman they know, but faith is like that.

Fortunately they can’t try out the second one. The first one is being done by the sneaky means of printing a lot of money and thereby devaluing all savings and denuding the middle class.

And they’re trying a lot of other crazy, self-obviously dangerous and stupid things, like apologizing to third world dictators and appeasing tyrants. To us, this is dangerous and insane, but to them it’s the right thing, and so it SHOULD bring peace.

See, the problem is that if they accept communism was wrong, wrong from the beginning, that it was a cult and as a cult it has failed to produce results, the emotional pain will kill them.  So they believe that if we all just wanted it really hard, and if they do all “the right” things, it will work.  “This time it will work.”

It’s no coincidence that both communists and Nazis were obsessed with researching the supernatural.  At some level they knew that was the only way it would “work.”

Our ancestors held on to crazy beliefs because it made it easier to live in a world where most of what they thought they knew was wrong and more often than not bit them in the ass.

Our “liberal” friends are in the same pickle. And no, I don’t know how to fix it, because no, rubbing their nose in reality doesn’t help. If the reality of the mess the USSR really was didn’t fix them, if they can believe Che “I club children to death with my riffle” Guevara was a sort of sensitive idealist, if they can believe this lousy economy is “recovering”, if they can believe, against all history, that bowing and scraping to tyrants like Putin will bring peace…. We can’t reach them. What can we use that will get through?

Nothing. And attempts to try make them uncomfortable and lead them to more psychotic responses. Hence why the Social Justice Whiners of SFF have now CONVINCED themselves that they live in a sort of chattel servitude and that until their enlightened selves appeared on the scene SF/F was all wall to wall white males writing about machinery.  This only requires them to ignore the last fifty years of publication history.  It’s much easier to believe than that you can levitate a building in the middle of Denver.  Child’s play.

And yes, they’re mad at us, because at some level they “know” that if we all JUST believed the same way, the world would work the way they want it to.  We’re keeping them form their paradise.  It would all be lovely if we just let them do the “right things.”  (Which involves, variously the rest of us “shutting up” or “going away and dying.”)

It won’t of course. Reality has sharp edges that won’t bend. As sure as the fire will burn, their attempts to do what they learned is the right thing will only bring more pain.  Because what they learned is the “right” thing has nothing to do with reality.  It is — not even religious — a magic belief, with no basis in reality.  And so it will fail.

But that will only make them crazier.

Is there a point where the tide turns? I don’t know. The human mind is an amazing, supple thing. Justifying is what it does. Civilizations have had their “hit bottom, turn around” moments, but the thought of what it would take for that makes my blood run cold and I don’t think we’re headed for that – not in our life times, at least.

So what comes next? I don’t know. They will continue to shrill for a long time. Louder, as things get worse. Just be ready for that.

And teach the children well. There is some indication that at least the kids can see reality, once they’re out of school some years. At least some of them. (The crazy we’ll always have with us.)

There will always be some people trying to levitate the Denver Mint or its equivalent. Some people really need fluffy pink clouds around the edges of their reality. But provided we stop now, and combat everywhere we can the bizarre idea that communism is the most advanced form of government and that we’re inevitably headed there, we should eventually be all right.

Oh, not in my life time, and possibly not in the lifetime of anyone reading this. But this mess started before we were born. We’re in it for the long game.

Just keep fighting, and be aware that for a while the response is not going to be just hateful, or just crazy. The response is going to be bonkers (as well as hateful and repugnant.)

If we’re very lucky, the world won’t end in chickens, and the species will recover from this wobble and go on.

Misandry – by Cedar Sanderson

Lately I’ve run into a sort of bizarre mentality. People expect to be safe. I mean, really safe, everywhere, all the time.

No, I’m not being ironical. Which I only need to explain because this bizarre idea that you can be safe everywhere, so perfectly safe that nothing bad ever happens.

Do I need to tell you that’s impossible?

Three incidents from my life:

My older son was three when we took him to visit my parents, who took us to a nice beach resort for a week. The place is extremely safe. At night you might run into a drunkard, and of course, you could drown (though you’d have to make an effort. I can’t swim and never managed it, not even as a kid.) Safe, right?

My mom took my son for a walk. Walking along the street above the beach, kid starts screaming, his face starts swelling. He was stung by a bee and we had to take him to emergency for a shot.

Is the sane thing to call for legislation for bee control? Or to carry an eppi pen? (He doesn’t even do that, turns out this wasn’t exactly a normal bee and his allergy is very specific, so if we’re not in Portugal, he’s fine. And the reason I’m not being specific here is that I only understood half the explanation, even in Portuguese. He is, however, deathly scared of bees to this day.)

Take last week – I was in my kitchen, about to make lemon tea for my son who had a cold, when suddenly I THOUGHT someone had thrown a stone at the window.

It wasn’t. It was hail storm from h*ll. It ended up okay, but if we’d been out walking, I’d probably have been (at least) concussed. Hail control? Or keep a – ah – weather eye out and a place in mind to run to while out walking in summer?

Take the time I was 20 and someone came out of a dark alley and grabbed me as I left college after dark in Portugal. Madman control? No, of course not. What I should have had is a gun, but this was not allowed in Portugal and my dad refused to get me one. So I defended myself with what I had on hand and ran away.

Take that last incident. Every time something like this happens here, I hear talking heads both wringing their hands over “how could this have happened” and calling for laws to prevent it.

Somehow, the idiot in Hollywood who killed people with a knife and a gun is the fault of the NRA for… encouraging the people to have the means to defend themselves.

Honestly, I think this is the “baby proof” generation and their parents distorting the thoughts of the nation.

When I first got pregnant, my oby-gyn gave me a packet on baby proofing the house. I jaw-dropped.

I grew up in an early nineteenth century farmhouse, imperfectly adapted to the 20^th. In another country. Yes, we had exposed electrical wires, massive furniture I could pull on top of myself, stuff that was dangerous stored where I could reach it. It never occurred to grandma to move the wood-chopping ax, let alone the knife drawer. In the yard, there were agricultural implements, in my grandfather’s carpentry workshop, well, everything. And I played in there all the time.

It never occurred to anyone to move things, take things away, hide things so that the world was a safe play pen for me.

Instead, they made me a world-proofed the child. A lot of watching, a lot of “don’t touch that, because—” Some slaps if I insisted on trying it. (Who, me, stubborn?) Not SPANKING as such understand? Kids that small, a little slap on the hand and they recoil. Oh, wait, people are against physical punishment, so their kids never learn to control themselves. Because little slaps on the hand will make the child violent, or something. This despite the fact every great ape spanks. (And don’t come to me with our being rational beings. Two year olds aren’t. And at any rate this sort of thing needs to be trained-in below the conscious level. It’s not a “reason with me” moment.)

Were there incidents? Only one. I danced barefoot on a wood pile granddad had bought from a demolition to recycle. (Apparently mahogany of a certain type is only obtainable that way.) Tetanus shot, trip to the hospital. I lived. I also didn’t do it again.

Should he not have had the wood in the workshop yard, because I existed? I bet now they’d charge him with neglect. And it would be stupid. NO ONE CAN KEEP TRACK OF A SIX YEAR OLD EVERY SECOND. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE.

Yesterday in comments there was talk about how women shouldn’t have to defend themselves. Men should be taught “not to rape.” Oy. Where to start. Most men never have any interest in rape. (Unless you define rape as “looked at me funny.”) Those that do aren’t likely to take teaching any too well.

The best thing you can do when someone is threatened is to have them defend themselves. They’re right there, and it’s their life on the line.

There are limits to this, of course. I couldn’t send my little ones armed to school. So I taught them what to do if they even suspected there was an intruder. Schools are gun free zones, of course, but that doesn’t stop people intent on killing other people from bringing them in. It’s a funny thing. If you’re going to do murder, you’re okay with violating rules. And what’s more, you know all victims and their teachers are disarmed.

So I taught the kids to use EVERYTHING – desks, books, chairs – as a weapon. And, before it came to that, if they even suspected there was a shooter, break a window, get out, run away in zigzags. If it wasn’t a shooter, mommy will explain and pay.

Paranoid? Better paranoid and alive…

The world can’t be made safe. There’s always a mad man. You need to be able to do what you can to defend yourself and others.

And if the worst still happens? None of us is immortal. You can die in a crash, and you can die of a bullet. Or you can die safe in your bed. Dead is dead. I wonder if these precious flowers of “I wanna be protected” realize that some day they’ll die. Sure as shooting. No matter how careful they are.

And the same goes for nations. You can’t have a safe world. The war to end all wars wasn’t, and wasn’t said by anyone sane.

No matter how GOOD you are as a nation, and how much you apologize, it’s a wide world, someone will attack you.

You can’t babyproof the world, and it’s scary when we have an administration that thinks if we’re attacked it’s all our fault.

World politics ain’t beanbag. If you both want the same thing, you will fight. And even if your nation decides not to – say, sends Putin a stern rebuke instead of a nuke – the other side won’t stop because of that. On the contrary. Aggressors don’t take your pacifism as an example. They just view pacifists as easy prey.

For this reason, we have fighting men, who volunteer to defend the nation. May G-d bless them and keep them and provide them leadership who won’t expend them in futile gestures and grand philosophical crusades.

And may those who gave their life protecting this nation rest in peace, and know that in a world that can’t be made safe, they did what they had to do.

And let’s not forget them, their sacrifice, nor how necessary it was.